SDR is one of the trendy technologies of the moment, and I couldn’t resist the temptation to buy one of those cheap RTL2832U based DTV receivers, usable out-of the box as a SDR.

The device comes with a fronted (R820T) with a built-in LNA, which is normally powerful enough to fed the receiver when using a short cable, but since I wanted to experiment with an antenna mounted on a relatively long and thin cable, I built a small LNA to be mounted at the far end, near the antenna.

The LNA is based on the Mini Circuits PSA4-5043+, and the board is designed to be as small as possible to fit in line with the antenna and cable, and to be powered by the receiver itself.

Recently I’ve been playing a lot with sensors around the house and I’ve decided to make myself a breakout board with all of the common parts the sensor board, including the power supply, microcontroller, wireless interface and
battery charger.

This board can be used to quickly deploy some sensors or actuators, and can be configured to work from battery (for low power applications) or from an USB port (to be used with phone charger). The PCB fits into an Hammond 1551R box.

Sometimes you learn about an interesting IC and you build an entire circuit around it for no other good reason… This project is one of those!

The TPS2378 is an IEEE802.3at (Power over Ethernet) Powered Device controller, featuring internal pass MOSFET for loads up to 25.5W, Type 1 (a.k.a. 802.3af) compatibility and auxiliary power source support.

The IC is normally used together with a DC-DC step down regulator to power a network device (the PD) from a PoE compliant switch or injector (the PSE). A proper 802.3at device requires an isolated power supply with some safety characteristics that makes it not trivial to implement, and there are many DC-DC ICs with integrated PoE controller to make it easier, but as I wasn’t really interested in that part I just went for an easier project with just the PoE controller and some ballast… And what better ballast than some high power white LEDs!

This project is a small PoE flashlight, that can be powered by any 802.3af or 802.3at compliant injector or switch. It can be used as a PoE tester, or if you get trapped in a dark datacenter at night!

LED based home lights are becoming more and more common each day due to their higher efficiency, and their price is starting to fall to an affordable level. Most commercial AC LED lights on the market are meant to replace 230V E27 lamps, as that socket is big enough to fit an AC/DC converter inside.

I have recently found myself with some floor and roof halogen lamps that I wanted to convert to LED, but I wasn’t able to find a commercial replacement for the 12V AC powered G4 lamps and I did not want to replace the power supply, so I decided to run my own design!

This project is a small LED based lamp designed to replace AC halogen bulbs, and to fit in a small 3cm diameter PCB.

CAN bus is an automation fieldbus commonly used in the automotive industry as the main network bus to allow communications between the many on-board ECUs on modern vehicles.

The Linux kernel has native CAN bus support at network layer since some years, with a lot of drivers for both embedded and USB CAN bus controllers, so it’s now fairly easy to add a CAN bus interface to any Linux laptop and have a playaround with it.

In this post I’ll show how to tap into a modern car local bus, dump a bunch of data and analyze the trace offline to write a decoder from scratch using the SocketCAN APIs and utilities.

The DSO-2090 is marketed as an 100 MSPS with 60 MHz analog bandwidth, though the full sample rate is available only when using a single channel. As Hantek also sells similar models with higher performances, I immediately took the device apart to better understand how it works and to see if it can be pushed a bit more, especially regarding the realtime sample rate.

This post is a basic analysis of how this oscilloscope works with some consideration of its limits, and it may be interesting to better understand how a basic DSO works.

Optical fiber is an intriguing technology, deployed all over the world connecting computer networks with the speed of light (well… almost).

Unfortunately, due to the inherent complexity of fiber network installation and management, optical fiber devices have never found their way in the hands of the user, and are usually deployed only by professionals for things such as backbones, long hauls or really fast interconnections.

Luckily enough, older optical fiber Ethernet components, especially 100MBit ones, are now available as a reasonably low price, so I decided to design a couple of USB to 100BASE-FX network cards just for fun and to learn more about working with optical fibers.

This project contains two complete hardware designs for USB to 100BASE-FX network cards, one with a 1×9 transceiver and one with an SFP slot. Both designs are based on the ASIX AX88772B chip, and fit in a compact Hammond 1551 series box.

Also, there are some useful links and information about designing with OF transceivers and SFP modules.